Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations

Edited by William G. Acree Jr. and Juan Carlos González Espitia

Publication Year: 2009

How did culture and identity take root as the new nations and state institutions were being fashioned across Latin America after the wars of independence? These original essays tease out the power of print and visual cultures, examine the impact of carnival, delve into religion and war, and study the complex histories of gender identities and disease.

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book was born out of the activities and experiences of a working group within the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. Created in 2004 as "Latin America in the Nineteenth Century" and continuing through the 2006-2007 academic year, this group held regular meetings and brought scholars from across the United States to give talks on themes that appear throughout this volume...

Introduction

In Latin America, national origins and national histories began with independence. Independence was nation building, or the beginning of the process of nation building, as could be seen one hundred years later in the displays of centennial celebrations of independence...

Part I. Lasting Impressions

Chapter 1. Foundational Images of the Nation in Latin America

Nation and nationalism have made their mark on scholarship in the most divergent disciplines, fueling debates that have focused on connections to literature, history, memory, narrative, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, and culture. Scholars of visual arts and communication studies have also actively engaged in these debates. Indeed, few and far between are the academic disciplines that have not been affected by conversations on nation and nationalism...

Chapter 2. Words, Wars, and Public Celebrations, The Emergence of Rioplatense Print Culture

Serial novels constitute the majority of narrative fiction written in Mexico from the 1840s to the 1870s. While in literary histories these novels are often relegated to a category of inferior literature, I argue that these texts functioned as important instruments for the construction and dissemination of national models, and thus served as a fundamental tool in the early phases of the nation-building process in Mexico.1...

Part II. Cultures on Display

Chapter 5. Forms of Historic Imagination, Visual Culture, Historiography, and the Tropes of War in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela

Clio’s ClosetThe relationships between the written word and visual culture throughout the nineteenth century were complex. They shared symbolic spaces, mobilized didactic forces, sought to delineate their respective domains, and fought over clientele...

Carnival is the time of year reserved specifically in the public life of Latin America for transgressive activities. Carnival happens during three main, "fat" days that are always a Sunday through Tuesday determined by the date of Easter, which must fall between 22 March and 26 April. Carnival Sunday is seven weeks before Easter Sunday...

Chapter 7. Performing the Porfiriato, Federico Gamboa and the Negotiation of Power

A president comes to power under questionable circumstances with
the support of conservative forces in Mexico and abroad. Pro-business and other major newspapers publish editorials in the
United States that hail the newly-elected leader as a friend of progress, while in Mexico the political Left questions his legitimacy...

Part III. Ideologies, Revelations, and Hidden Nations

Chapter 8. The Imponderable and the Permissible, Caste Wars, Culture Wars, and Porfirian Piety in the Yucat

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a specter haunted devout Mexicans: the specter of liberalism. Yet another revolution had taken place in 1876, but no one knew what it meant for the long run...

Chapter 9. Birds of a Feather, Pollos and the Nineteenth-Century
Prehistory of Mexican Homosexuality

Chapter 10. Unveiling the Mask of Modernity, A Critical Gendered Perspective of Amistad funesta and the Early Chronicles of Jos

On the cover of the 1840 French translation of Hieronymus Fracastorius’s poem “Syphilis,” a vignette features a masked woman with her handsome courtier kneeling in front of her.1 From the side angle, only a spectator could see that beneath the masked face of the beautiful woman lies the disease and corruption of the prostitute...

Chapter II. A Brief Syphilography of Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Ideas of construction, building, and foundation are recurrent in the
study of nineteenth-century Latin America. The processes of independence and the implementation of republicanism are generally presented under the positive light of agglutination and progress...

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